As mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, become ubiquitous, people have started to utilize devices to view private, confidential, or otherwise sensitive information. In various use cases, the private, confidential, or otherwise sensitive information could deal with work-related information, email, health information, financial information, or any other information that the user may consider sensitive. As such, in various contexts, the user may wish that such sensitive information not be visible to passers-by, curious onlookers, intentional snoopers, and/or other people who might be in the vicinity when the sensitive information is displayed on the screen. One way to prevent other users from seeing information displayed on the screen would be to purchase a physical filter that can be placed on the screen such that the displayed information is only visible to those directly in front of the display and occluded, obscured, or otherwise not visible to others (e.g., a person sitting at an angle). However, such a physical filter could be expensive, reduce screen visibility from the perspective of the intended user, and otherwise be cumbersome to employ.
Another potential approach to protect unauthorized users from viewing sensitive information displayed on the screen could be to provide an application with sufficient intelligence to determine the sensitivity associated with the information to be displayed and to take appropriate steps to display that information in a protected manner. In other words, the application can leverage capabilities associated with a display such that the display or certain sections within the display can be dimmed, polarized, or otherwise altered to restrict viewing using software-controlled mechanisms. However, these techniques generally apply to a device with content-aware and display-aware applications, which may be restrictive in the sense that the application may not be able to decipher the sensitivity associated with all data that may be displayed. Moreover, these software-controlled mechanisms do not allow a user to provide an input to control the context and the manner in which to restrict viewing.